


The Master of My Fate

by middlemarch



Category: Beauty and the Beast (2017)
Genre: Ball, Character Study, Conversation, F/M, House Party, Pre-Movie(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 20:37:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10395597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: He'd slipped into the alcove for just a moment.





	

“Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves.” Adam couldn’t recall the number of times he’d heard Mrs. Potts scolding a new housemaid with the aphorism, clucking at the end if the girl blushed and wrung her hands, setting an unpleasant task, like fetching the guests’ chamber pots, if the girl was brash or scornful. She’d never said it to him, “and I never would, Master Adam, you may be sure of that!” though as a little boy, he’d skulked through the hallways, finding any hidden alcove he could, wishing he could find his way into the forests in the tapestries where unicorns slept and knights flickered through a green wood.

Perhaps she should have said it to him and meant it, cuffing him lightly on the ear, or shooing him from the kitchens without a biscuit or tart; perhaps he would have learned his lesson, better than he had ever learned the Ancient Greek Giogos Callimachus had tried so hard to teach him when he was fourteen. She hadn’t and he hadn’t and now he was caught in one of those same alcoves, listening to two of the ladies invited to the latest house-party discussing him and his relative…merits.

“He is generous, no? The table groans, the halls blaze with beeswax candles, there can hardly be a flower left in his garden,” one voice offered. A soprano, slightly nasal, pausing for effect. He could not place it, her, there were so many of them, all powdered and rouged, all curls and hair braided with ropes of pearls, trying to make their silks rustle like an aspen grove.

“But it’s all for show, with no sincerity. He is wasteful and wanton about it, gives to those who have, not to those who need,” another voice replied, lower, richer. Leontyne was her name or Eglantine-Laure, he couldn’t recall, only her peculiar pale grey eyes so unexpected against her brown skin that she decorated with gilt and kohl. He’d told her they looked like moonstones and she had turned her back to him.

“He’s graceful and his touch is divine, the way he looks into a woman’s eyes, to make her forget she is a comtesse,” the soprano challenged, sighing a little as if she recalled his hands upon her.

“He’s selfish, he plays upon the vulnerabilities, he gratifies himself and if the woman is pleased, it’s nothing to him. He doesn’t bother to conceal when he’s bored by a confession, a kiss, a virgin’s tentative caress,” the contralto insisted. Leontyne, he was sure now, he remembered her singing to herself as she walked in the hallway and how she had ignored his carefully fashioned compliment, asking him what his favorite song was, smiling when he could not choose. He had not wanted to tell her about the song Maman had liked, about the lark, that made him think of dawn in July, when the heat of the day was a promise and not the curse it could become.

“He’s handsome and brilliant,” Leontyne’s companion said.

“He’s lazy and superficial, he spends more time on his wig and his paint than any scholarship, any endeavor for his people. He thinks every woman would be delighted to fall in love with him, when that is the greatest sorrow that could befall her,” Leontyne replied.

“Not quite the worst,” the other woman said, his champion. “She might become his wife.”

Leontyne laughed then, merry, sly, cold and the other woman joined her. Tonight they would eat at his table and dance in his arms, their breasts pushed up to entice him, fragrant with jasmine, musk, attar-of-roses, all desire, all deception. That was the truth, that they would try to deceive each other and that they would fail. His pillow would be smeared with silver, lapis, rouge when they woke together, their faces blank.


End file.
